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April 2020: Maria is awarded her F31. Tom is awarded his K23. Congratulations to both of you, and THANK YOU for providing some much-needed good news in the middle of a global pandemic!!
David and Tom find that with genotypes at just 3 SNPs + age at symptom onset, you can guess reasonably well which PD and DLB patients will have concomitant Alzheimer's Disease pathology at autopsy. We think this has implications for therapeutic targeting of tau and amyloid-beta in PD patients during life. You can read the preprint here.
January 2020: Junchao and Fei join the lab. Welcome!
Alice and Maria ask whether "Omics" are hope or hype in an (opinionated) review for Trends in Genetics that you can read here.
November 2019: Noor and Rebecca join our team. Welcome!
October 2019: Multiple years, multiple cohorts in the making, we find that plasma GHR, BSP, OMD, and Aminoacylase-1 differentiate PD from controls, after screening 1000+ proteins in 500+ people. You can read Marijan and Maria's paper here.
June 2019: Amazingly, two lines of research in the lab have converged! We find that TMEM106B, a gene we have been studying for years in frontotemporal dementia, modifies the rate of cognitive decline in Parkinson's Disease. You can read Tom's paper here.
June 2019: Our fabulous undergraduates Yunji, Ben, and Daniel are upping the game in the lab. David begins his lab rotation. Welcome, all!
YEAR 9
YEAR 9
February 2019: Alice and Maria attend the launch of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Neurodegeneration Challenge representing one of the collaborative science teams (with David Walt and George Church). Alice is later profiled by the CZI. You can learn what book she has read more than 15 times here.
February 2019: Defne and Alice, in collaboration with Beverly Davidson, try to deliver GRN using AAV viral vectors. We get an unexpected immune response. You can read about it here. You can also read some thoughtful comments on the preprint here.
December 2018: Alice and Henrik Zetterberg argue that it's time to update our definitions of Parkinson's Disease for a molecular age in a perspective in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease.
November 2018: Jeremy and Noah join the lab. Welcome!
October 2018: Alice wins the Derek Denny Brown Award from the American Neurological Association. You can read about it here. You can find the slides from her award lecture here.
September 2018: We launch the Molecular Integration in Neurological Diagnosis initiative with support from the Penn Translational Neuroscience Center and the Penn Center for Precision Medicine. Our goal is to molecularly characterize all of the (2000+) Parkinson's Disease patients seen in our clinic. You can read about the launch here. You can follow our progress on this more clinic-facing project here.
August 2018: Alice and her 40 closest friends write a perspective for Science Translational Medicine on what is needed to develop useful biomarkers for Parkinson's Disease. Check out the summaries of useful resources for people seeking human samples in the paper, or apply to access our Penn-based samples with the form on this page.
YEAR 8
YEAR 8
May 2018: Mike and Alice write a review on what has happened post-GWAS in human genetics. We think it's time to tackle function. And we're not just talking about eQTL analyses.
February 2018: Tom publishes his paper investigating predictors of cognitive decline in PD in Movement Disorders. TLDR version: Alzheimer's Disease-related processes are really important.
January 2018: Alice joins the Executive Scientific Advisory Board for the Michael J. Fox Foundation -- excited to make some inroads against Parkinson's Disease!
October 2017: Mike's tour-de-force paper demonstrating that the causal SNP at the chromosome 7 locus associated with FTD alters chromatin architecture and thus expression of TMEM106B is published in AJHG. You can read some press about it here or here.
YEAR 7
YEAR 7
May 2017: Nimansha is chosen for a Rose Award for her undergraduate thesis work with our lab. Only 10 are awarded per year, across all fields. Congratulations, Nimansha, and well-deserved!
April 2017: Michelle is awarded the American Academy of Neurology Clinical Research Training Fellowship in Parkinson's Disease for her work with the lab! She is the sole winner in Parkinson's Disease.
Mike successfully defends his PhD thesis! Congratulations, Mike!
March 2017: Laura Baratta joins the lab. Welcome, Laura.
January 2017: Pilar Hernandez-Con joins the lab. Welcome, Pilar.
December 2016: Our work on pharmacogenetics in Parkinson's Disease is awarded one of the first pilot awards from the Penn Center for Precision Medicine. You can watch a fancy video about it here.
YEAR 6
YEAR 6
May 2016: Alice finds out that she is tenured 1 day before our six-year anniversary! She writes a gushy letter and decides to try her hand at blogging (see side bar, because, really, isn't tenure about being able to say whatever you want?!) in response.
April 2016: Christine Cooper's work on SNPs that predict motor progression PD is featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer. You can read the article here.
March 2016: Defne is the sole Philadelphia winner of the Brody Fellowship for research support. You can read about it here. Alice opines on "Neuroscience Trials of the Future" at the National Academy of Medicine (IOM). You can see what she (and a lot of other people) thought here.
January 2016: Marijan Posavi joins the lab. Welcome, Marijan.
July 2015: Sixth lab baby (6 babies in <6 years... productive in many ways) is born. Congratulations, Rakshita!
May 2015: Alice is one of this year's Distinguished Alumni Award winners for the Duke TIP program. Alice is very nervous about following John Green, a previous Distinguished Alum and author of Fault in Our Stars, but she is excited to relive her many wonderful memories of summers spent at nerd camp on the Duke East Campus. Here is her "ode to being a physician-scientist," pitched at the under-13 crowd.
YEAR 5
March 2015: Alice is very honored to be this year's internal speaker for the Penn Combined Degree students. Especially as she only has one degree herself.
March 2015: Alice tries her hand at public lecturing courtesy of the Neuroscience Graduate Group. You can watch the video here.
January 2015: Rakshita Charan joins the lab. Welcome, Rakshita.
December 2014: Mike's NRSA application is funded on his first try. With an unbelievable score. Good job, Mike!
November 2014: Alice's summer book report (a.k.a. review in Neuron) on how to find biomarkers in neurodegenerative disease is published. You can find the paper here.
September 2014: Christine's paper demonstrates that genetic variation in the APOA1 gene promoter correlates with ApoA1 levels in PD. You can find the paper here.
August 2014: His and Hers Beach Lab Party with the Plotkin lab! Jordan Mak joins the lab. Welcome, Jordan.
June 2014: Fifth lab baby is born. (5 babies in <5 years. The fertility is astounding!!) Congratulations Defne!
May 2014: Fourth lab baby is born. Congratulations Travis!
May 2014: Yosef wins the Joseph Leidy award for undergraduate research for his work in the lab. Congratulations, Yosef!
YEAR 4
April 2014: Alice wins the Jon Stolk Award (for research in movement disorders) from the American Academy of Neurology. You can read the Penn press release here. Yosef reports on Alice and his work on statins in PD at the same meeting. You can read the press release here.
March 2014: Defne Amado (currently a neurology resident, joining the lab this summer) learns that her R25 research project in biomarker discovery is funded. Christine wins one of just two Brody Fellowships awarded for postdoctoral research support. Gentlemen of the lab, the ladies are KILLING it right now…
March 2014: Mike's paper demonstrates that TMEM106B is the first known genetic modifier of frontotemporal dementia associated with hexanucleotide expansions in C9orf72. You can find the paper here.
November 2013: Third lab baby is born. Congratulations, Ashley! The whole Chen-Plotkin family (consisting of 2.5 scientists so far) is featured on a podcast by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. You can listen to it here.
November 2013: Alice and Judy's work nominating Apolipoprotein A1 as a biomarker for Parkinson's Disease risk is featured by the Dana Foundation. You can read it here.
October 2013: Johanna's NRSA application is funded on her first try. Way to go, Jo!
July 2013: Lab beach party! See pics in the gallery.
June 2013: Tyler Skrinak joins the lab. Our wonderful "Boys of Summer" (Ben Liu and Yosef Berlyand) win awards (see links for Ben, Yosef) to conduct their summer research projects in the lab. The lab now acquires a sporty bent, which is very surprising to Alice (who once won the "Best Effort" trophy at tennis camp).
YEAR 3
May 2013: Robert Arauz-Perez joins the lab.
November 2012: Christine Swanson joins the lab. Big first day -- attending the launch of the PD Biomarkers program at the NIH.
September 2012: Second lab baby is born. The lab is disappointed that Alice did not name her Alexa Fluor Chen-Plotkin.
August 2012: Our TMEM106B paper is published. You can read about it here.
June 2012: Pierce passes his prelim!
YEAR 2
May 2012: Mike passes his prelim!
January 2012: First lab baby is born! Congratulations, Travis!
July 2011: Pierce Nathanson joins the lab.
June 2011: The lab moves to Johnson 1. Three stressful days -- then up and running again (yes, hard to believe, but it's true).
YEAR 1
May 2011: Johanna passes her prelim!
May 2011: Alice wins a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinician-Scientist Development Award.
April 2011: Emily Ashbridge is accepted to both UPenn and UChicago for college. She is featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer for her softball and academic prowess, but can't be photographed because she is presenting her research at the American Academy of Neurology.
January 2011: Johanna Busch and Mike Gallagher join the lab.
November 2010: Our PD biomarker work is featured on the UPenn School of Medicine home page, local NPR station WHYY, and CBS3. You can read the press release here and watch the TV clip here.
November 2010: Emily Ashbridge publishes her first paper ever. As co-first author. As a high school student. You can find it in our publications (Vass et al, 2010).
July 2010: Alice is featured in the UPenn Institute on Aging Newsletter. You can find it here.
May 2010: The lab opens its doors.
May 2010: Alice is featured on the NIH Blueprint in Neuroscience website. You can read it here.
2008: Alice wins the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists. You can read the Penn Medicine story here.
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